CDC official discusses new STI prevention tool
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to soon issue draft guidelines for the use of doxycycline to help prevent the spread of gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis in transgender women and gay and bisexual men who have sex with men.
Doctor Leandro Mena, director of the public health agency’s Division of STD Prevention, talked to the Washington Blade by phone on Thursday about the post-exposure prophylactic intervention — DoxyPEP for short — which he characterized as “the first important innovation that we have had in the field of STIs in almost three decades.” Studies show a 200 mg dose of the widely available antimicrobial antibiotic, if taken within 72 hours after sex, has shown tremendous efficacy in reducing the risk of transmitting these three diseases, he said.
For now, research is limited to certain LGBTQ populations for whom “we know that network prevalence, the prevalence of STIs in the sexual network of this group, is sufficiently high that the benefits outweigh the potential risks,” Mena said, while “other strategies like the use of condoms, you know, are not really that feasible.” Research on DoxyPEP conducted and published over the past couple of years has been game-changing, he said, “because it’s an antimicrobial that’s already approved, we know it’s very low-cost, and I think we have the evidence of its effectiveness.” “Since the development of nucleic acid amplification test — which allows [providers to] diagnose gonorrhea and chlamydia by amplifying nucleic acids, by doing PCR, that really revolutionized access to STI testing — we really haven’t had much,” Mena said.
